Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes — wrongly — it has no enemies.

In Sweden, by 2050, almost one in three people will be Muslim.

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that “evil” comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male — and never from non-European cultures. Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the “other”, above all the migrant.

A tiredness seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue taking away human lives and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia.

In a prophetic conference held in Vienna on May 7, 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, “The greatest danger to Europe is tiredness”. Eighty years later, the same fatigue and passivity still dominate Western European societies.

It is the sort of exhaustion that we see in Europeans’ falling birth rates, the mushrooming public debt, chaos in the streets, and Europe’s refusal to invest resources in its security and military might. Last month, in a Paris suburb, the Basilica of Saint Denis, where France’s Christian kings are buried, was occupied by 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists. The police had to intervene to free the site.

Pictured: French police eject some of the 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists who occupied the Basilica of Saint Denis, on March 18, 2018. (Image source: Video screenshot, YouTube/Kenyan News & Politics)

Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University in London, recently published a report, “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion”:

“Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.

According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them… “And we know the Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates.”

Richard Dawkins, an atheist and the author of The God Delusion, responded to the study’s release by tweeting to his millions of Twitter followers:

Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme:
“Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”

Dawkins is apparently concerned that that after the demise of Christianity in Europe, there will not be an atheistic utopia, but a rising Islam.

That is the major point of what Philippe Bénéton in his book The Moral Disorder of the West (“Le dérèglement moral de l’Occident“): Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes — wrongly — it has no enemies.

According to Radio Sweden, fewer newborns in that country are being baptized due to the demographic shift. By 2050, almost one in three people in Sweden will be Muslim, according to a recent Pew report

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that “evil” comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male –and never from non-European cultures. So Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the “other”, above all the migrant. The heritage and legacy of Western civilization gets sectioned off piece by piece so that nothing remains; our values are mocked and our survival instinct is inhibited. It is a process of decomposition that Europe’s political authorities seem to have decided to mediate, as if it were inevitable. Now, the European Union waits to receive the next surge of migrants, from Africa.

In German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s major speech in the Bundestag after the unprecedentedly long and difficult process of forming a new government, she struck a conciliatory tone on immigration while offering an inclusive message on Islam. “With 4.5 million Muslims living with us, their religion, Islam, has also become a part of Germany”, she said.

The most powerful politician in Europe capitulated: she evidently forgot (again) the difference between the civil rights of individuals, which Muslim citizens enjoy in Germany, and the sources of a national identity, on which Europe is based: humanistic, Judeo-Christian values. This realization may why a week earlier the new German Interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said that “Germany has been shaped by Christianity” and not by Islam.

Europe’s tiredness can also be seen in a generational conflict embodied in the alarming rise of public debt. In Italy, the political establishment was recently shaken up by the election of two major populist parties. It is a country with a public debt of 40,000 euros per capita, and a tax burden equal to 43.3% of GDP. The average age of the population is the third oldest in the world, together with one of the lowest birthrates on the planet, one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe and the highest social security spending-to-GDP ratio in the Western world. It is also a country where pensions account for one-third of all public spending and where the percentage of pensioners in proportion to workers will rise from 37% today to 65% in 2040 (from three workers who support one pensioner to three workers who support two pensioners).

An Islamist challenge to this tired and decaying society could be a decisive one. Only Europe’s Christian population is barren and aging. The Muslim population is fertile and young. “In most European countries—including England, Germany, Italy and Russia, Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births from 2010 to 2015,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

Terrorist attacks will continue in Europe. Recently, in Trèbes, southern France, a jihadist took hostages in a supermarket and claimed allegiance to ISIS. It seems that Europe’s societies consider themselves so strong and their ability to absorb mass immigration so extensive, that nothing will prevent them from believing they can assimilate and manage terrorist acts as they have automobile fatalities or natural disasters. A tiredness also seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue murdering people and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia. The most likely scenario is that everything will continue: the internal fracture of Europe, two parallel societies and the debasement of Western culture. Piece by piece, European society seems to be coming irreparably apart.

When are we going to say that enough is enough? According to Act For America, more than 30,000 documented terror attacks have taken place around the world since September 11th, 2001. And in case you were wondering, almost all of those terror attacks were committed by radical Islamic terrorists. According to one website that tracks these things, in 2017 alone “there were 2035 Islamic attacks in 61 countries, in which 15,700 people were killed and 14,302 injured.” Even though ISIS is on the ropes, Islamic terror continues to spread, and we must boldly confront this threat.

But instead, many western nations have been eagerly importing large numbers of young males from hotbeds of Islamic terror. As a result, levels of crime are absolutely exploding. Just check out the latest crime numbers from the city of London…

For example, gun crime in London is up 15 percent, homicides are up 25 percent, including an explosion in youth homicide of 70 percent, robbery is up by more than a third.

Those numbers are extremely chilling, but there is more. According to WND, the number of acid attacks in London has “soared exponentially” in recent years…

Among the most terrifying crimes in London are acid attacks, which have soared exponentially since 2014. There were 431 such attacks record in 2016 and police report they have become the tactic of first resort for some gangs.

Acid attacks also seem to be correlated to the large Muslim population in some areas of the city.

Of course London is far from alone. Over in France, the chaos and violence never seems to end. On New Year’s Eve, more than 1,000 vehicles were set on fire, and authorities are claiming that this is a victory because that number only “slightly exceeded” the figure from last year when 935 vehicles were torched…

New Year’s Eve celebrations in France have turned out to be not only a time of joy, but also a frantic spell for police and emergency service personnel who faced mass disorder across the country.

The number of vehicles torched during the festivities that spiralled out of control in Paris and other French cities have surpassed 1,000, the French Interior Ministry said in a statement reviewing the New Year’s Eve celebrations. The number of vehicle arson attacks “slightly exceeded” last year’s figures, when 935 cars were set alight, the ministry added.

Things are getting really bad elsewhere in Europe as well.

Over in Germany, one recent study concluded that the recent spike in crime in Germany has been caused primarily by an “influx of mostly young, male migrants”. The following originally comes from Reuters…

The recent influx of mostly young, male migrants into Germany has led to an increase in violent crime in the country, according to a government-funded study published Wednesday.

The study used figures from the northern state of Lower Saxony to examine the impact of refugee arrivals on crime in 2015 and 2016, a period when the number of violent crimes reported increased by 10.4 percent.

The authors concluded that 92 percent of the additional crimes recorded could be attributed to the increase in refugee numbers.

What is happening in these western European nations is completely and utterly obvious to us, but the politically-correct crowd is still in a horrifying state of denial.

For example, just check out the storyline of a new television movie in Germany…

The TV movie “Break-out to the Unknown” (WDR/ARD Degeto), on Wednesday, 14 February 2018, at 8.15 pm, tells the tale of family fleeing a totalitarian system under life-threatening circumstances, from an unusual perspective: in the near future, Europe has collapsed into chaos. In many countries right-wing extremists have taken power. The formerly democratic state of Germany has become a totalitarian system that persecutes dissidents, Muslims and homosexuals.

As a lawyer, Jan Schneider (Fabian Busch) has taken the side of dispossessed victims. When he learns that the regime intends to put him in prison once more, he decides to flee. His goal is the South-African Union, which is enjoying political and economic stability after an economic boom. A cargo ship is to take him, his wife Sarah (Maria Simon) and both children Nora (Athena Strates) and Nick (Ben Gertz) together with other refugees to Cape Town, but the people traffickers put the passengers in boats that are far too small in front of the coast of Namibia.

And here in the United States, you can actually be arrested and prosecuted if you say the wrong things about radical Islam. The following comes from Information Liberation…

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is attempting to prosecute 41-year-old Mark Feigin for criticizing Muslims on the Islamic Center of Southern California’s Facebook page in September 2016.

The Attorney General’s Office claims Feigin’s Facebook posts were “meant to annoy and harass” through “repeated contact by means of an electronic communication device” in violation of Cal. Penal Code § 653m(b) and should therefor not be protected by the First Amendment.

Have we gone completely and utterly insane?

We are trying to convince ourselves that radical terrorists that are committed to achieving world domination by violent means are actually solid citizens and will openly embrace us as friends if we will just treat them with kindness.

Meanwhile, the reality of the matter is that we are witnessing rape after rape and terror attack after terror attack.

In Sweden, violent gang rapes are becoming so common that incidents such as this one barely make a blip on the news anymore…

On January 21, 2017 in Uppsala, Sweden three men broke into a woman’s home armed with guns, tore off her clothes and gang raped her for three hours while livestreaming the whole attack on Facebook. Similar to other horrific rapes, the liberal mainstream media refused to unequivocally identify the offenders as Muslim immigrants. Jihad Watch reported that “The Swedish publication NyheterIdag says that the attackers were “nysvenskar,” that is, “new Swedes,” which is the establishment media euphemism for Muslim migrants.” A 21 year old woman came forward after she saw the Facebook broadcast and stated that she recognized one of the perpetrators who raped her 15 months earlier.

If you are “pro-woman”, you should be speaking out about this. But instead, many have been trained to believe that they can’t stand up and defend these victims because it might not be “politically-correct” to do so.

The goal of radical Islam is to completely dominate the entire globe. The intend to dominate us physically, mentally, emotionally, financially and spiritually. Omar Ahmad, the founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), once made the following statement about what his organization’s ultimate goals are…

Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.

We are not going to allow these jihadists to install their totalitarian system in the United States. They are the enemies of liberty and freedom, and we are going to fight their agenda every step of the way.

Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah leads Hezbollah, one of Lebanon’s most dynamic and most discussed political parties. This video explains Hezbollah’s origins and its political goals.

The regimes of Saudi Arabia, Israel and beyond this, successive US leaders have been engaged in a long-time disinformation campaign against the Lebanese political party and and popular resistance movement, Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is today, one of the most dynamic political forces in Lebanon whose firm opposition to the Takfiri terrorism of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS has been vindicated by the victory of the Syrian government over foreign funded jihadists.

Hezbollah traces its origins back to the second phase of the Lebanese civil war. After Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon in 1982 and began exploiting Lebanon’s sectarian tensions, Hezbollah officially formed in 1985 as an anti-occupation resistance movement whose primary goal was freeing Lebanon of foreign occupation.

The same year Israel invaded Lebanon, it orchestrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre in which 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were brutally slaughtered. This event was pivotal in helping to galvanise the volunteers who would eventually form Hezbollah as a means of defending those who were erstwhile defenceless.

Since the official end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, Hezbollah has consolidated its experience and has become a highly influential political movement. Although centred around its Shi’a core in southern and eastern Lebanon, Hezbollah has come to win support from many diverse factions which comprise Lebanese society.

During his recent trip to Moscow, Lebanese Foreign Minister Geral Bassil of the primarily Maronite Christian Free Patriotic Movement, praised Hezbollah’s role in keeping Lebanon safe from jihadist terrorism. Hezbollah’s armed wing serves as a kind of national guard for Lebanon and in recent years, Hezbollah has volunteered to aid the Syrian Arab Army along with its Russian and Iranian allies in fighting terrorism. Hezbollah recently conducted joint operations with the Syrian Arab Army which resulted in the full defeat of al-Qaeda/al-Nusra and ISIS along the mountainous Syria-Lebanon border.

Today, Hezbollah has the third highest number of seats of any party in the majority March 8 Alliance in the Lebanese parliament. Hezbollah also has two cabinet ministers in the coalition government.

Hezbollah which styles itself as the Islamic Resistance of Lebanon is opposed to further Saudi influence in Lebanon while seeking to maintain partnerships with Iran and Syria. Hezbollah continues to win votes as its volunteers build many roads, schools and hospitals in Lebanon, in areas that the central government has traditionally neglected.

Now watch this new video about the past, present and future of Hezbollah:

“For the moment, let’s forget the $9 billion dollar trade deficit the US has with Israel, and focus on the $38 billion US Senator Lindsey Graham and others approved for Israeli defense recently.

$38 billion dollars divided by 453,000 out of work vets, that’s $83,885.21 rounded to the nearest cent for each-and-every GI Joe or Jane out there. But I know it will take some IMPACT here for readers to share this with ALL their Average Joe friends out there. Let me spell this out. No funds for the IDF to blast Palestinians to smithereens – 453,000 new businesses and zero unemployment for down and out vets.”

“Average Joe”, who’s an American veteran down on his luck, he could have begun his own landscaping or mechanic business when hard times came. Only Uncle Sam was too broken to gift good old Joe $30,000 or so to get things rolling. It’s too bad, because Joe got a bronze star and lost a leg over there in Iraq. If Joe’s family only knew how Zionist, pig bankers had cost millions of Americans an alternative future, then maybe we’d all stand a better chance of life and liberty. But, they don’t know yet.

For a couple of years now I’ve laid awake nights trying to figure out how to convey to my countrymen the catastrophic abuse of power leveraged by Israel’s Washington based henchmen. At first, I was like most people, worried friends and enemies alike might call me an “anti-Semite” for the insinuation of Zionist lobby skullduggery. Then, a murdered and sodomized Libyan leader made fun of by a presidential candidate, and a few tens of thousands of dead kids over there in Syria, Yemen, and in Gaza, and some more in Yemen, they caused me not to give a damn what people label me as. But wait, what about my Jewish friends? What would they think if I jumped feet first into Bibi Netanyahu and his AIPAC vampires? Alas, my Jewish pals mostly got fed up too, at envisioning the bitter end of an abusive Israeli regime. None of them want a Hitler “final solution” on a global scale. And that’s where Tel Aviv is headed in my opinion. Seeing Netanyahu dangle US President Donald Trump like a wooden puppet in front of a live audience – well, the jig is up for most sane people I think. Realizing just how dastardly these Israeli (Zion Israel that is) interests are, that’s what spurred me to find the “Average Joe” quotient! The slap across the face that hopefully wakes some Americans the hell up.

The All-American Hobo

Let’s profile our All-American Joe here. He just like most of the rest of us, you know? Joe loves his country, his neighbors, and he adores all the legends of freedom and liberty, and especially the red-white-and-blue dream, remember he’s a vet too. Even though his future got shattered and stagnated a bit while serving in the US Army, Joe lives in the same information bubble as the rest of us. He’s wrapped up tight by CNN, Hollywood, the New York Times, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Once a week Joe goes to the unemployment office, just like he’s told. Unable to get an even break, he does the house chores while his wife works at Burger King flipping Whoppers with cheese. Good old Joe sometimes has to go to the pawn shop to unload something of value, something worth less than a grocery store visit to buy Cheerios for his little kids. Yeah, you get the picture now. I am hammering like hell on your sense of brotherhood, community, and civic pride in war heroes. You bet I am. Because I know most of your fail to care anymore. I know most of you are contented in that little bubble of existence. But, suck it up and read on. This is the reality of your apathetic and lazy patriotism – Average Joe is your next-door neighbor. And Average Joe should not be contemplating blowing his brains out – but you let Joe down – we let Joe down – Washington caused Joe to consider blowing his goddamned brains out, because we collectively turned a blind eye. We populated the halls of power in our country with liars, cheats, criminals, and the puppets of evil men, and of evil nations.

Now let me educate all the past, present, and future “American Joes” out there. Just so you know what has been happening while you slept.

While I’ve no space here to discuss properly what’s known as the “Movement for Greater Israel”, it’s important that the reader grasp the ultimate goal of new and old Zionists (see a moderate Zionism definition here). What this group wants is nothing short of the reestablishment of King David’s Empire, which encompassed all of the so-called “Mandate Palestine, the British Mandate of Palestine and British Palestine” plus Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, as well as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, Oman, Yemen, most of Turkey, and all the land east of the Nile river. Granted, this is an ambitious plan that is hard for “Joe” to grasp, but any reader can watch the news and put two-plus-two together. If Joe can accept my assertion here, then I am sure he will better understand why he is in such a fix. But let’s move on to examine the Zionist plan, stumbling blocks, and progress so far. Yes, of course, that is if this plan actually exists.

There are only two big problems with creating this great big land of “Greater Israel”. First, there are one hell of a lot of Arabs in the way. Second, getting those Arabs the hell out of the way is costing Americans and the rest of the world an unbelievable price. On the first point the proxy militaries of Zion and America are rapidly subtracting Arabs from King David’s former territory. Those that cannot be cluster bombed, beheaded, shot, blasted, or otherwise butchered are simply starved to death or die of disease. The rest will probably move to Europe if the lobbies there work hard enough, and if not America has lots of free land left. And this brings us to our main point, how AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and hundreds of other supporters of Netanyahu’s dreams of empire robbed poor heroic Joe of his future.

The Zionist Dream

Now, you’ll recall I said that all our hero Joe needed was a small grant to rev up his business. Most of you reading this probably have better math skills than me, so please try and divide and subtract or multiply some numbers here. According to the most recent figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (which are always WAY conservative), there were 453,000 jobless veterans as of 2016. So, let’s focus on these “GI Joes and Janes” for a moment. For an initial instance, let’s assume that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Arab Spring, and the Ukraine mess are not for the benefit of “Greater Israel”. Let’s just do some math with the massive funding through tax breaks and donations for Israel’s defense industry, the IDF, and gigantic weapons loans from the US that never get paid back. Let’s pretend Americans care more about “Joe” and less about genetically pure Israelis (more on this in a later post). For the moment, let’s forget the $9 billion dollar trade deficit the US has with Israel, and focus on the $38 billion US Senator Lindsey Graham and others approved for Israeli defense recently.

$38 billion dollars divided by 453,000 out of work vets, that’s $83,885.21 rounded to the nearest cent for each-and-every GI Joe or Jane out there. But I know it will take some IMPACT here for readers to share this with ALL their Average Joe friends out there. Let me spell this out. No funds for the IDF to blast Palestinians to smithereens – 453,000 new businesses and zero unemployment for down and out vets. Yes, Utopia, I know. But let’s continue, because this is just the chump change the Zionists levy from us. I won’t break down the private funding direct to the IDF. I will not harp about the star studded galas and auctions Hollywood and high society hold to shower gifts of “BILLIONS” on Israel. Read this article and discover those. Now, it’s time to return to the big picture, and to the role of Zionists in the wider world’s affairs. Let’s assume logically that the enemies of Israel, especially Arab nations, was the real cause for the so-called “war on terror” initiated after the 9/11 attacks by then US President George W. Bush.

Most of your reading understand I am not the first analyst or journalists to presume Israel and the Zionists have been behind recent wars. And I am not just talking about admitted anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan, who always called the Twin Towers attacks a false flag operation. Forget wild eyed conspiracy theories for the moment, and instead look at evidence inside books like “The Zionist War on Terror Creates More Terror”, by Christopher Bollyn. A short excerpt from Bollyn serves to set the stage for my last assertion here:

“As long as Western governments and societies allow themselves to be deceived about the true nature of terrorism, the “War on Terror” and the threat it is meant to eradicate will only get worse. For our political leaders and media to go along with false-flag deceptions and to flail away at phantoms is to ensure that the “War on Terror” will go on for a very long time. The only way to liberate ourselves and our nations from this madness is to expose the true source of terrorism.”

Without bombarding you with 9/11 theories and anti-Israel rhetoric, it’s completely fair to say hard liner Zionists in Israel, America, and across Europe have played a major role in brewing conflicts in the Middle East. If we can admit that Greater Israel is part of this chaotic stew of destruction, then it is far easier to show “Average Joes” everywhere just what the costs of American and Israeli policies is. For the sake of this argument, here are some even more amazing “if” figures.

Since the so-called “War on Terror” was launched, experts claim that the United States has squandered in between $3.2 and upwards of $5 trillion dollars. I think it’s fair to assume that it’s costs Americans more than $4 trillion since 2003, so let me run with this figure.

I Want My 80 Grand Back!

Yesterday I was on hold with the Social Security Administration for 47 minutes on an international call to solve my initial retirement payments. While I waited the robot in charge of held calls kept telling me, “We provide benefits to over 50 million Americans, so there are very busy times. We are sorry for your long wait”. At that moment, this article was on my mind. I thought to myself over and over, “fifty million, fifty million into $4 trillion or so?” As I type this I am recalling over 40 years of hard work. I’m thinking about my fellow 50 million countrymen, and all the hard work I saw those “Average Joes” doing over the decades. And I am thinking about the $900 bucks a month my early retirement (63 instead of 65) gets me. I think I am “Average Joe” perhaps, and I am thinking $4,000,000,000,000.00 divided by 50 million. What is that figure? Wow, it comes out to $80,000 dollars! Now let me frame (or hammer) this in.

Without a war to destroy all of Israel’s neighbors and enemies (in my scenario) the people still alive who helped build and fuel the American dream could EACH have a lump sum payment of 80 grand! Eighty thousand dollars, what could the average retired person do – buy a small house – never pay rent again – get that eye surgery so desperately needed – live a little bit longer or more comfortably – survive instead of subsist! I am now thinking about an aged couple I know back home in South Carolina, and about the cat food I once caught them eating a couple of days before their US Treasury checks arrived. I’m thinking about my US veteran retired friend, who has to go to the VA to be treated like an animal. I am thinking about my own $900 dollars and how I will make due abroad, with no medical insurance except what my wife can pay for. Peace and $80,000 for America’s retired “Average Joe or Joanne” – or perpetual war until Greater Israel is established. Until the Syrians are killed or un out of the coming “Northern Jerusalem Empire”….. Take note folks, Americans got ZERO from these lost wars.

This is harsh, I know. It seems a bit conspiracy theoretical too, I understand. But after three or four years of research and analysis, and roughly twelve to fourteen hours a day hard at it, I’ve made my diagnosis. If killing and chaos, if the economical warfare and crookedness of our political processes are the illness, then rampant Zionism is the contagion. From my perspective western societies have been literally infected by an insidious flesh eating bug, a blood sucking tick that spreads a bigoted and elitist disease that will eventually destroy us all. Like the small, seemingly harmless little tick, the animal driving American policy breeds more animals in the blood it extracts from its host. And you think my seemly affront on Zionism dastardly or inappropriate? Then go and do your own pathology work. Look at the patient in his eyes, check his pulse, listen to that frail heartbeat, see his suffering, and try and cure humanity yourself. All I know is, “Average Joe” has not even been made aware of the parasite that has cost him everything.

How’s that for a wakeup call Joe?

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Shortly after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, made a candid confession to the Army Times, “I’m running out of demons, I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” Amid the general bonhomie of the military interview, Powell nicely encapsulated a central truth of empire: it doesn’t want peace. Never did. Imperialism, the monopoly stage of capitalism, is based on conquest. Peace is little more than an aftermath in the imperialist vision. It is the dusty rubble-strewn silence that descends on Aleppo when the jihadists have been bussed out. It is the silent pollution of the Danube when the NATO jets have flown. It is the quiet that settles on the Libyan square once the slave auction has concluded. Peace is an interlude between the birth of avarice and the advent of aggression. Little else.

If Powell confessed empire’s disinterest in peace, he also expressed the need of the imperials state for a steady supply of new enemies. Conflict is the lifeblood of imperial capitalism. It is how the ruling class further enriches itself. It is how the global elite expand their dominion over the planet. Those who will not pay tribute under threat of menace, must ultimately face the menace. But this truth, that the imperial state is the carmine tip of elite expropriation, must not be aired among the hoi polloi. It is the unseemly underbelly of power and if it were widely understood it would hack away the legitimacy of the state, which is only justified by its nominal commitment to the welfare of the nation. That claim only appears legitimate in the face of some grim and ghastly threat. Powell understood that with the nasty specter of the evil empire crumbling to ash on an Asian plain, a spine-chilling new antagonist would have to be invented to replace it.

Enter the specter of Islamic terror. Islamic terrorism is largely the product of American terror. It is wittingly conjured into being through our wanton destruction of Muslim societies. We did not attack Muslim nations in order to produce a new enemy. We attacked them to extend our control of natural resources, shape the trade routes of the future, and expand the reach of global capital. But the epiphenomenon of terrorism was both predictable and embraced as a casus belli. It is the hobgoblin used by ruling class media to frighten western populations into acquiescence with the west’s warlike vision for global hegemony.

But western populations have of late grown weary of the terrorist scourge and the endless storylines of restive migrants doing the dirty work of mysterious jihadists on the Disneyfied streets of western capitals. Jets into skyscrapers. Cars into crowds. Backpacks in corners of concert halls. High-rise shotgunners spraying bullets into public squares. Terror fatigue is spreading across a western world that could only sustain permanent stress levels for so long. Thankfully, for the managers of empire and its media flacks, a reborn Russian state, rising from the ashes of a capitalist looting spree, has provided a second narrative front in the war for the mind of the west. A different visage emerges. Not the bearded votary narrating a death wish to a shaky cam. But a Muscovite in a bespoke suit with a supercilious grin on his sly poker face. The optics are different, but in a media environment of constant overexposure, that is a good thing.

Both terrorism and a revanchist Russia represent figments of horror in the minds of western citizens. They are the bête noire with which we can shape our worldview and pepper our cocktail conversations. We do not realize that Islamic terror is largely a product of American terror. We do not see that American aggression provokes Russian self-defense. As such, these orientalist caricatures represent the hypocrisy of imperial neoliberalism, which is forever flying the false flag of economic justice and democratic freedom over its just-conquered capitals. Inhabitants of those broken cities know better, as their standard of living plummets and their dictators are replaced by juntas. They know the west is like Joseph Conrad’s sepulchral city, where an alabaster exterior hides a crypt of rotting flesh. That is the real vision that western media works so feverishly to disguise, one no sane person could stomach. That’s why the media must craft fresh Frankensteins at such a feverish pace. Fairy tales of secular missionaries bringing the gift of free-market democracy to the benighted tribes of the east.

Globalization and Its Discontents

The terminology of that fairy tale is telling. The term ‘globalization’ has been used as a portmanteau containing all of the sly nuance of neoliberalism. Globalization is the rush of capital into every conceivable crevice of the planet in search of profitable new ventures. Unfortunately, markets must be pried open with war when rhetorical picklocks don’t suffice. The term ‘humanitarian’ is the masque we now affix to the gruesome face of war whenever we must attack some recalcitrant socialist backwater. What we used to call a ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, we now call a ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Middle East. Historians call that ‘progress.’

The effect of this noble-minded fustian is to pacify a population and to marginalize anyone who attempts to reveal the true character of imperial action. Who would oppose a globalizing force of open markets that promise to bring ‘developing’ and ‘emerging’ nations online and on par with our post-industrial west? Those who do can hardly explain the extractive nature of neoliberal globalization or its deindustrializing effect on developing economies before they are skewered by the flagbearers of humanitarianism. Who would deny the righteous cause of intervening to halt imminent genocide? One has barely called into question whether genocide is actually imminent before being fleeced by the rhetorical guardians of the west’s civilizing mission. The righteous R2P. One has hardly breathed a word of how the ‘war on terror’ is largely generated by the state terror we inflict on other nations before being rubber-stamped a traitor and told to leave the country (if you don’t like it).

The fable must be accepted. We are spreading freedom and equality. Simple as that. End of story. Say that the United States is the greatest counter-revolutionary force in the world, and be branded a traitor–by the counter-revolutionaries. Wherever democratic freedom rears its ugly head, you can be sure that U.S. media flacks, as well as special forces, drones, proxy terrorists, and battalions are on hand to crush what they claim to defend.

Softening the Blow

The fairy tales are told by the mainstream media, shamelessly so. The Wolf Blitzers of the world devote themselves to the slavish production of fresh threats. The liberal MSM is represented today by outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. These ciphers take the crude evasions of the White House, State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence agencies, and camouflage them. They dress them in muted tones that dampen the drama of blast craters. They massage the story to elide the facts that might produce introspection or taint the purity of our self-image. Self-criticism is inappropriate, but the righteous condemnation of other nations is a moral mandate. Print everything in classic fonts, with well-designed column widths, and add in world-class photography that turns ruination into artistic representation. This is the manna consumed by the acolytes of exceptionalism.

Nothing better embodies the empty ruse of liberalism than the bulky deadwood of the Times. There is of course the elitist coverage of mini-breaks in distant villas, where war-torn peasant societies repair their communities round a communal table. There are the heady profiles of the latest restaurant trends, where the bearded Brooklyn chef with neck tats touts his vegan currywurst to the gentrified hood. There is the fastidious theater review and the effusive real estate forecast. Filler aside, readers will be reminded that war is necessary when America wages it; globalization is inevitable when it means free markets, and free markets mean individual freedom; multiculturalism and mass immigration are desirable to all, irreversible, and a moral imperative; and inscrutable new alien threats are profiled with an Orientalist’s hopeful but ultimately worrisome and mystified gaze. Little mention is made of the fact that our conflicts are provably imperial resource wars; that in nearly every port of call our country wages counter-revolutionary battles that stifle liberation and independence; that globalization has wrecked the American standard of living through labor arbitrage and offshoring; that immigration ought not to be coupled with austerity unless the objective is race wars; that the lives of women, LGBTQ, and people of color are collateral damage in the crosshairs of empire; or that American capitalism has no interest in delivering jobs, living wages, or upward mobility to its extant population, let alone its newest members.

When these mostly taboo subjects are noted, they are presented as a perplexing side effects of a noble project of laissez faire globalization. They are unfortunate but must not be rashly addressed. Better to endlessly maintain the status quo as one wrestles with the philosophic implications of global capitalism. This was Obama’s favorite tactic. Open a dialogue, but don’t change anything important. This dissembling attitude was beautifully expressed in a recent Twitter thread which detailed seventy years of Times articles proclaiming a dizzying succession of reform-minded princes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the patriarchy’s misogynist grip on power is as firm as ever, as is Washington’s backing. The last post in that thread noted Thomas Friedman’s sycophantic paean to the new idol of Saudi imperialism, Mohammed Bin Salman, or ‘MBS’ to his fawning admirers. Friedman’s article was printed last week.

When not absorbing the high culture of the Times literary supplement, one finds the corporate liberal Democrat happily digesting bite-sized reports from the National Public Radio (NPR). Here the adherence to the state view is no less vigilant than in print. Thus when NPR interviews a CIA psychologist who tells us that whistleblowers are either psychopaths, narcissists, or lingering in some irresponsible adolescence, the “national security correspondent” fails to challenge these claims. And when Australian broadcasting interviews Hillary Clinton, it allows the venal egotist to smear WikiLeaks as a Kremlin tool and call Julian Assange a narcissistic opportunist without the slightest resistance. Questions about the shady dealings of the Clinton Foundation are feebly set aside at the merest sign of discomfort by Madame Secretary. And Times op-ed writers like Friedman can happily call for support of al Qaeda, destroying target societies, and cheerlead more global wage leveling by chastising workers for not falling in lockstep with the elitist program.

These are the signs of a dead discipline. The mainstream media is no longer adversarial. It takes the official story at face value. It has abdicated its proper role in a democratic society, which is partly why we are no longer a democratic society. As Princeton University has explained, we are effectively a plutocracy. Thanks to the MSM, though, most of us continue to believe the rhetorical platitudes of our corrupt leaders. Media is one of our numberless emasculated institutions, which are now authoritarian and warlike. (See liberal faith in the Mueller investigation, led by a neoliberal imperialist who fought to crush Vietnamese socialism and led the FBI, one of the most regressive and criminal organizations in the world.) Like readers who still place a naive faith in the government, MSM writers continue to believe they are doing independent journalism in the service of truth (“Democracy dies in darkness,” the Post implores us). But real journalism accepts nothing at face value. It is the Socratic voice that unsettles the consensus.

Bot Bylines

Instead of incisive journalism that digs, defies, and holds power to account, we get self-censoring media automatons pampering oligarchs and pretending that all good-thinking people care deeply about the state of the state. Listen to the soothing language of the New York Times on the supposedly earth-shaking Russian influence campaign on social media. It hits all the right notes without seriously challenging the narrative. Note how it bleeds concern. This kind of journalism is a palliative for the conscience of a liberal. Ah, the “thorny debates” inside Facebook, no doubt had “in good faith,” and subject to “fateful misunderstandings,” if Ken Burns were documenting it. “Executives worry” and there is considerable “hand-wringing” afoot in good faith efforts to wipe out “fake news.”

Even the protagonists of the story are usefully quoted. Facebook lawyers, commenting on the miniscule purchase of ads over a two-year period from accounts with even the most tenuous Russian connection, much of it after the election, much of it not even mentioning presidential candidates, and the creation of bots to grow click farms, recoiled in horror and called the knowledge “deeply disturbing” and “an insidious attempt to drive people apart.” This is theater for the masses. Cue the organ grinder.

The goal of this domestic conditioning is to remove the democracy from democracy. The objective is to create a hollow shell of a democratic society, representative on the outside, plutocratic on the inside. The marble tomb inhabited by necrosis. This is deliberate. Read Alex Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy for a nice overview of how America’s collective conscience has been shaped by corporate forces. Why? Because we are the enemy. The enemy is our freedom of thought and speech, because that is what inevitably leads to democratic, socialist, or communist change that benefit the people as a whole, not just the vanishingly small margin of corporate elites who promote and profit from war, conquest, and rule. The problem with democracy is that it isn’t very profitable for capital. Socialist countries tend to emphasize social services. It is extremely hard to make money delivering quality social services to the poor. Really, the only way to make money off of social services is to deliver inadequate social services to the middle class for extravagant fees. See Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act for a master class in this technique. Monopoly capitalism is incompatible with actual democracy. To the degree that a truly democratic society can have free markets, they must be strictly regulated, prevented from reaching monopoly status, and completely walled off from public institutions. Otherwise, they will cannibalize those institutions, reshaping them as rubberstamp organs of elite profit.

As it is, democracy is merely the mask that disguises the engines of imperialism. It is useful in this regard because, unlike socialism, democracy makes no serious claims on the means of production. It depoliticizes the most political issue of all: economics. Thus the manufacture of enemies, job one for the ruling class media, always targets socialist-leaning nations that sense the need for economic justice alongside social justice. Even if they are mixed economies that provide space for open markets, like Venezuela. It makes no difference. We mustn’t tolerate the slightest majoritarian impulse in the economic arena. All such beliefs must be terminated. We must be refashioned as foot soldiers of exploitation. To this end, western propaganda outlets have made psychologist Erich Fromm’s warning sound less like prophecy than predestination, “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli capital shows the US is part of the Middle East problem, writes Finian Cunningham.

“Washington has bankrolled the state of Israel with $3 billion every year in military aid; has turned a blind eye to every violation under international law by Israel; and offers unwavering support for Israeli transgressions through the American veto at the United Nations Security Council.”

US President Donald Trump makes one of the most protracted and painful world problems sound like he’s selling a condo between two parties. With cheesy easiness, he bluffs everybody gets a “great deal.”

“We want an agreement that is a great deal for the Israelis and a great deal for the Palestinians.” Thus spoke Trump this week in announcing US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel.

The American property tycoon-turned-politician has shown again this week his vast ignorance of international relations. The trouble is that Trump’s rank foolishness risks inflaming the already combustible Middle East region and beyond.

Arab nations, including some close American allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are furious at what they see as a historic “betrayal.” For Arabs and Muslims, Jerusalem – or at least the eastern half of the “old city” – is regarded as the spiritual capital of a future Palestinian state.

The ancient city is home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, containing three unique religious sites. The eastern half of the city, which is legally Palestinian territory but under military occupation by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War, is where the ancient religious sites are located. Trump’s unilateral designation of Jerusalem as the Jewish capital is therefore as reckless as it is provocative.

In defiance of near-unanimous opposition from around the world, President Trump went ahead this week to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel. The announcement violates international law which stipulates that the city is a contested matter to be resolved through peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

While Trump claims the US is still supportive of peace talks for a “lasting settlement” what his declaration this week does, in effect, is settle the seven-decade-old dispute on the side of Israel.

“We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved,” said the president.

But that’s contradicted by Washington now recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Nevertheless, if the political tinderbox region does not explode with violence over Trump’s latest declaration, one good thing to come from this debacle is this: at long last, the so-called “peace process” can be seen for what it is – a charade, in which Washington has posed as an “honest broker” overseeing the relentless suppression of Palestinian rights.

“My announcement today marks the beginning of a new approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” intoned the American president.

Note how Trump refers to the conflict between “Israel and the Palestinians.” One of the parties is a state – “Israel” – while the other party is made to sound like a group of people – “the Palestinians” – who must somehow be accommodated around the priorities of the former.

Trump’s sonorous claim of “a new approach” is nothing but the same old path that American administrations have trodden for the past seven decades since 1948, when the Israeli state was established by acts of violence against Palestinians – Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, living in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

That path has been one of pandering to the aggressive expansion of the Israeli state – in spite of numerous United Nations resolutions condemning the annexation of Palestinian territory.

For the past 25 years, since the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords between Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian counterpart Yasser Arafat, the US has served as self-appointed mediator.

But the purported peace process has yielded little for the Palestinians toward their aspiration of a final sovereign state with East Jerusalem as their internationally recognized capital. The American-brokered peace process is all process and no peace. That process is one of continual annexation of Palestinian land through the building of Israeli settlements – in flagrant violation of international laws.

Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu – who was the only world leader to welcome the Trump’s announcement this week – declares, along with his right-wing cabinet that Jerusalem is the “eternal Jewish capital.” It is obvious that for Netanyahu’s government there is no intention to engage in peace negotiations with Palestinians to reach a final status of two states.

For Israeli hardliners, there is no peace process – despite lip service. There is only a process of relentless dispossession of Palestinians, which first began in 1948.

American governments have long been complicit in this charade of dispossession regardless of pious pretensions of being an “honest broker.” Washington has bankrolled the state of Israel with $3 billion every year in military aid; has turned a blind eye to every violation under international law by Israel; and offers unwavering support for Israeli transgressions through the American veto at the United Nations Security Council.

Trump’s is not offering a “new approach.” He is instead ramping up a very old policy of American government indulging Israeli intransigence.

Why now? Part of Trump’s announcement this week from the White House – with a Christmas Tree background – was a gift. A gift to his evangelical Christian voter-base represented by Vice President Mike Pence looking on as Trump heralded the good tidings. For these supporters, Jerusalem is a Messianic issue. Another gift was to the right-wing pro-Israeli lobby in Washington, like billionaire Jewish businessman Sheldon Adelson, who reportedly donated $25 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. (So much for alleged Russian influence!)

When Trump emphasized, “I am delivering,” he sounded like he was playing Santa Claus for his backers.

But Trump’s foray this week is more like a bull in a china shop. His reckless ignorance will unleash huge repercussions of which he has very little awareness. The region is presently racked by war, with missiles flying across borders. Israeli aggression is already provoking Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. Trump’s fatuous gift-bearing could unleash a regional Intifada that tears apart America’s Israeli ally.

There are also dangers for America’s Arab allies. Elite rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE, and Bahrain, among others, are angry at Trump partly out of fear that the popular rage he is inciting across the region over his Jerusalem designation may end up sweeping these autocratic American clients from power.

Paradoxically, Trump’s rash intervention this week is potentially a good thing. Inadvertently, it allows for a more accurate, realistic framework in which to bring about a peaceful settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This conflict is at the root of the region’s never-ending tensions.

The United States is no longer mistaken as a neutral mediator. Its role as a self-appointed honest broker is over.

What’s needed now is an international, multilateral forum in which Palestinians are at last afforded real equality under international law. The Palestinian sovereign right for national status must be advocated in the context of an illegal occupation by Israeli forces. The full sanction of international law must be applied against Israeli transgressions going back to at least the 1967 war.

American chicanery, as illustrated again this week by Trump, is part of the problem. It can never be part of the solution, and it is good that Washington’s pretense is now discarded.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and start preparations for the US to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested city, has the potential to further inflame tensions across the Middle East.

Although this is not an unexpected move – Trump expressed his intention to do so during his electoral campaign – the decision breaks with years of precedent.

Trump’s decision to move the embassy means he will not follow his predecessors by renewing a waiver on the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which required the embassy to eventually be moved from Tel Aviv.

Since then, there has been a cross-party consensus in the US that any act which recognises the annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel and its designation as the country’s capital would affect the fragile balance of power in the Middle East – and the ability of the US to promote its interests in the region. US diplomats have sought to tread carefully on this issue in one of the world’s most treacherous political landscapes.

The Palestinian leadership condemned the move before Trump spoke, as did leaders from the Arab world and beyond. The announcement of the embassy move is likely to cause a wave of resentment among Palestinians in the occupied territories and the city itself, especially after two decades of stalemate in the peace process and deteriorating conditions throughout the Palestinian territories. Ahead of the speech, US citizens and government employees were told to avoid Jerusalem’s Old City and the West Bank until further notice.

Central to the peace process

Jerusalem is not just a city of historical importance to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, but also a site key to both Israeli and Palestinian identity. Add to this the centrality of the status of Jerusalem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often described as one of the world’s most intractable disputes, and it’s clear why the decision to move the US embassy there has been described as tantamount to political arson.

At the political level, most Israelis and Palestinians insist that Jerusalem must be the capital of their states, present and future, and that this is non-negotiable. This is why the final status of Jerusalem was deemed to be one of the thorniest issues in the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. It was envisaged to be circumnavigated, dealt with only at the stage of “permanent status negotiations”, once all other issues between the state of Israel and the Palestinians were resolved.

As there has not been any progress in less important, yet substantive issues since Oslo, the issue of Jerusalem has acquired a symbolic importance among Palestinians.

Trump at the Western Wall on a visit in May 2017.Ronen Zvulun/EPA

Jerusalem is a city dense in symbolism in the Palestinian national imagination. Particularly so as other, more material anchors of identity such as territory, governance and self-determination are continually being eroded by the harsh realities of Israeli occupation, the blockade of Gaza and deteriorating cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian authorities.

The response to Trump’s announcement by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and most of his government was muted. But its symbolic value among nationalist circles in Israel, and also among many ordinary Israelis, should not be underestimated.

The Israeli government has been active in strengthening Israeli claims to the entire city since its annexation in 1980. Settlement building around Jerusalem has aimed to ring-fence the city and integrate it more into Israel. Meanwhile, there were building restrictions in East Jerusalem, and a series of restrictions to Palestinian access to the Al-Aqsa mosque, built on the remnants of the last Jewish Temple. Both sets of restrictions were lifted.

Equally important in terms of symbolic politics has been Israel’s archaeological intervention around Jerusalem, which Palestinians see as an attempt to strengthen Israel’s historical connection with the city.

Wider significance

Trump’s decision seems oblivious to the fragility of coexistence in the city between its Israeli and Palestinian inhabitants. It also ignores the significance of Jerusalem in Palestinian national identity and national aspirations, and the devastating impact on the future of a moribund peace process.

It has the potential of not only affecting the political ecology of a place where history is a matter of life and death, but could also cause a ripple effect much further afield. It can destabilise a Palestinian authority already deprived of legitimacy and an array of fragile Arab regimes. And it is likely to accentuate the enmity between Israel and Iran. Iran perceives such a move as a “violation of Islamic sanctities” and, together with Trump’s revitalised alliance with Saudi Arabia, a clear sign of the US president’s anti-Iranian stance.

Last but not least, it could further stoke the flames of anti-Western Islamic movements in the Muslim world and the West alike, which have always put Jerusalem and the Palestinian issue in a central position.